Just got myself an X100!

[pbear1973]

Hi all!

I just got myself a Fuji Finepix X100 from Parisilk. I was hesitating for a long long while because I read all the negative stuff about it; back-focusing issues, wonky firmware, confusing menus, slow writes, camera locking up, etc.

Glad that I ignored all of these and got myself one. Awesome camera! The low-light performance is fantastic, pictures are sharp, and it's so, so quiet! And light! I've figured out the menu system (dunno why people say it's confusing), and I snap with a rangefinder as well so the parallax issues are nothing new to me. The back-focusing problem is really due to parallax and can be solved just by switching to EVF for close distances. Don't have a slow-write issue (because I don't do burst mode).

Really happy with my purchase! It's a worthy "fun camera" to complement my D7000.

 

[maechia]

please write MORE of your experience

I read too much negative reports
Perhaps you can help balance them

Thanks

ps, tell more of the manual focusing too

 

[streetfly]

i am contemplating getting one too.
Thought of renting one to try out first before taking the plunge.
How much did you pay for yours at Parisilk ?

 

[laialpha]

Hi all!

I just got myself a Fuji Finepix X100 from Parisilk. I was hesitating for a long long while because I read all the negative stuff about it; back-focusing issues, wonky firmware, confusing menus, slow writes, camera locking up, etc.

Glad that I ignored all of these and got myself one. Awesome camera! The low-light performance is fantastic, pictures are sharp, and it's so, so quiet! And light! I've figured out the menu system (dunno why people say it's confusing), and I snap with a rangefinder as well so the parallax issues are nothing new to me. The back-focusing problem is really due to parallax and can be solved just by switching to EVF for close distances. Don't have a slow-write issue (because I don't do burst mode).

Really happy with my purchase! It's a worthy "fun camera" to complement my D7000.

Slow write issue mostly due to additional files being written onto the card by computer while doing transfer to computer. Especially for Mac, one you plug the card in, Spotlight will try to index it and write something onto it.

Just hope the auto focus speed can be improved in future firmware.

 

[snip3r]

Wondering how much you got it at PS?

 

[Achim Reh]

my slow writing issues where gone after I put in a fast SD Card.
It's an absolute great camera.

 

[pbear1973]

please write MORE of your experience

I read too much negative reports
Perhaps you can help balance them

Thanks

ps, tell more of the manual focusing too

Ok had some chance to play with it before work and during lunch.. got a bit of time for a quick report:

What I like:
========

Size - It's pretty small, given that it holds an APS-C sensor.

Weight - Very light, barely feel it carrying it on my shoulders. Size+weight means that when I chuck it into my haversack I barely know it's there.

OVF - Larger field of view than the image, so you can see what's just outside of your frame and recompose if need be. Gives you a lot of information like spirit level, exposure compensation (or exposure, in fully manual mode), frame lines, focus correction (firmware 1.1.10 onwards), # of shots left, current ISO, current aperture, shutter speed, etc. Composition is fairly accurate, no worse than a rangefinder.

Build quality - Very nice, solid metal build.

EVF - Pleasant to use, bright, reasonably clear. Even when switched to OVF mode, you get a brief 1.5s view of your photo in the viewfinder after snapping so you know what it looks like and can re-snap immediately, without having to take your eyes off the VF. EVF is excellent if you find the camera back-focusing due to parallax at close distances. Switch on the EVF, refocus and problem is gone.

Dials and buttons - Well positioned so that you can change shutter speed, exposure comp, ISO, drive mode, macro mode, etc, without taking your eye off the VF. Full information in the VF

Picture quality - Very sharp, with nice dynamic range (but see below). See Ken Rockwell's sample images to see what I mean by very sharp and nice.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/x100/sample-images.htm

Shutter - As quiet as my Canon S95! Today I stood next to someone and took his picture. He didn't even know.

Menu - Simple. Only 2 groups: Shooting and Setup. Intuitive and easy to navigate.

Writing Speed - Reasonably fast even for raw. Unless you shoot in burst mode, you don't need to wait for writing to finish before snapping the next shot.

Looks - Definitely the prettiest camera out there!

LCD/OVF auto-switch - Nice and fast.

What I don't like
============

Pictures can be a bit washed out in bright sunlight, sometimes need to twiddle with the exposure comp (sorry I don't do fully manual; fiddling with both aperture and shutter speed is just too slow for street stuff). Then again I had been shooting at ISO1000 by mistake so it's probably washed out because of that. >.<

Aside from features to take pictures, the design for everything else seems like an afterthought. Like trying to get the strap loops (triangular metal bits that hold the strap) onto the camera was insanely hard. Thankfully you only have to do this once. Similarly trying to get the lens ring off so that you can attach the hood/filter adapter is also pretty difficult. Seriously why do I have to perform surgery to make use of their accessories?

Lens cap - Held down only by friction, meaning that if you bump into someone/something hard enough, it will fall off.

Manual focusing - Don't even think of it. Takes many turns of the focus ring. However since it's focus-by-wire, this is fixable in firmware so hopefully Fuji deals with it.


Menu button - Tiny, accidentally changed the drive mode several times while accessing the menu.

Aperture ring - A bit too small for my hands so changing aperture is a bit clumsy for me.

Macro mode focusing - Can be a little slow.

General focusing - I actually found it to be ok. Not anywhere as fast as my D7K, but that's expected right?

Impossible to connect USB cable/access SDCard/battery when the camera is in the half-case. So that means taking the camera out of the half case each time I wan to transfer pictures. This is a problem with the Fuji case though rather than the camera itself.

Need to reformat SD card after each insertion into my iPad. This is because my iPad apparently writes to the SD Card, and this causes slow-startup.

Bottom line: Great IQ, excellent control points for photo-taking, lightweight, very quiet, but little quirks here and there. I'm using the 1.1.10 firmware, characterised by the focus-correction option in the setup menu. Overall an excellent street camera.

So yeah, stuff I like and dislike after maybe an hour of usage. Will update as I gain more experience.

 

[UncleFai]

Congrats Colin... wow... you are going through cameras like crazy huh?

 

[pbear1973]

Congrats Colin... wow... you are going through cameras like crazy huh?

Haha thanks boss! Different cameras for different needs la.. I'm holding on to all of them. This will prolly be my last purchase for a long long while though.

 

[pbear1973]

Ok had some chance to play with it before work and during lunch.. got a bit of time for a quick report:

Follow up:

Just got back from an event held at a venue that was photographically challenging. The place was generally quite dark but with a bright spotlight illuminating part of it (long story). The EVF is a God-send! The OVF is practically useless in the darker parts, but the EVF on the other hand was bright and I could see my subjects well. The OVF was also useless when pointed towards the spot-light because the bright light whited out everything, but the EVF has automatic balancing that helped a lot.

I used ISO of between 2000 and 4000. Noise control is excellent with hardly any noise. Focus was a bit problematic when shooting "into the light" I guess because the bright spot-light whited out everything. But otherwise when the camera could grab focus, pictures were very sharp and colors were nicely balanced. Bokeh was surprisingly nice and creamy despite the short 23mm focal length.

Overall a really awesome camera. But yeah focus speed could be a bit better. Hope to take it to the streets next week and see how it performs there.

 

[NigelSeah77]

Very Interesting thus far pbear1973, thanks so much for updating us so ever faithfully. I am currently standing at the crossroads you faced previously I am a avid and very elated user of a D7000. So far, my d7000 armed with a 50 1.8G has just brought to horizons of happiness. But there has been many instances where whipping out a big hunky chunky DSLR is just very inconvenient. And at times intimidating to little children = P. Similarly i have read so many reports of various defects with the X100 which has keep my wallet on the sidelines. However the upcoming olympus OM-D camera may just win a sweet spot with me soon. Please keep us updated with your lovely journey with the X100. Great job !!!

 

[pbear1973]

Very Interesting thus far pbear1973, thanks so much for updating us so ever faithfully. I am currently standing at the crossroads you faced previously I am a avid and very elated user of a D7000. So far, my d7000 armed with a 50 1.8G has just brought to horizons of happiness. But there has been many instances where whipping out a big hunky chunky DSLR is just very inconvenient. And at times intimidating to little children = P. Similarly i have read so many reports of various defects with the X100 which has keep my wallet on the sidelines. However the upcoming olympus OM-D camera may just win a sweet spot with me soon. Please keep us updated with your lovely journey with the X100. Great job !!!

Thanks Nigel for the kind words. I will definitely update this thread as and when I get the chance to go out and shoot. Hope to post some images soon too (currently they're mostly of myself and friends, not so nice to post here.. haha.).

The D7000 is a sweet machine! Just out shooting with it yesterday at the Sentosa flower show. Super quick autofocus and awesome bokeh when I switched to my prime.

As for the X100, it's important to know that it's essentially a street camera. Discreet, light weight, very very quiet, awesome IQ, superbly positioned controls with a good positive feel to them. The night-time IQ is essentially unbeatable except by perhaps a FF camera. I've not done a side-by-side comparison with my D7K yet, but the X100 seems to have less noise at ISO3200 than my D7K has at ISO2000. Colors are rendered beautifully, skin tones are perfect, and the auto-WB somehow just works better than even my D7K (which I often have to correct in PP).

The downside is that it's not meant to catch fast action like sports, or even children playing. The AF is slow (0.4-0.6s based on a review I read), but IMO it's still faster than what most people can manage with a rangefinder (at least it's faster than what I can manage.. hahaha.. I'm always worried whether the images are perfectly aligned in my little yellow square). MF is virtually unusable (like, seriously. The boffins at Fuji deserve a whop across their noggin for making something like this!!). However set the camera to f4-6, set the MF to maybe 3-5 feet, and the zone focusing is pretty awesome, with very little shutter lag.

The OM-D is an m43 though; I've found my GF3's low-light IQ to be quite disappointing - ISO above 800 or 1000 is not very nice, so I always have to resort to the poppy-uppy flash which I hate doing. That's actually why I got the X100 in the first place. But then again the OM-D is the "next generation" of m43, so it would be much better than the GF3.

You might want to consider the Powershot G1X. Canon makes awesome compacts, and the 1.5" sensor is HUGE. Bigger than 4/3!

 

[wallet]

Hi all!

I just got myself a Fuji Finepix X100 from Parisilk. I was hesitating for a long long while because I read all the negative stuff about it; back-focusing issues, wonky firmware, confusing menus, slow writes, camera locking up, etc.

Glad that I ignored all of these and got myself one. Awesome camera! The low-light performance is fantastic, pictures are sharp, and it's so, so quiet! And light! I've figured out the menu system (dunno why people say it's confusing), and I snap with a rangefinder as well so the parallax issues are nothing new to me. The back-focusing problem is really due to parallax and can be solved just by switching to EVF for close distances. Don't have a slow-write issue (because I don't do burst mode).

Really happy with my purchase! It's a worthy "fun camera" to complement my D7000.

Im looking for x100 soon!!! Thks for sharing and busted the myths!

 

[pbear1973]

Im looking for x100 soon!!! Thks for sharing and busted the myths!

Haha you're welcome. Another thing though; the X100 WILL grab a shot even if it can't grab focus. So if you press shutter fully without half-press to check focus, your shots can sometimes be OOF. From the maybe 150+ shots I've taken, the camera always grabs focus except in very low-light (which also causes my D7K to struggle), poor contrast situations (like having a spot-light shining straight into the lens or aiming at a surface painted a single solid color), and when the subject is too close. So this isn't really a problem 99% of the time.

At distances of <80cm if you use the OVF parallax can sometimes cause the camera to focus on the wrong thing, so best to use EVF for short distances. Check out this thread too for more information from other X100 owners:

http://www.clubsnap.com/forums/fujifilm/931025-fuji-x100-part-2-a.html

7 Common complaints of the X100 and how to deal with them:

The top 7 complaints of the Fuji X100 and how I get around them. By Steve Huff. | STEVE HUFF PHOTOS

The camera is, by default, set to go to sleep after something like 3 minutes. Waking it up takes a bit of time. My advice is to buy several spare batteries (3rd party batteries are quite cheap on eBay) and just disable the sleep. I don't know yet if this is true, but intuitively I think switching off the back LCD and relying only on the OVF/EVF will lengthen battery life. Just press the "Display Mode" (or something) button at the bottom left corner to switch displays.

Good luck and I'm sure you will love your X100!

Edit:

Some statistics on shooting times, focus times, etc.


http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/X100/X100A6.HTM

It takes about 0.421 seconds to focus and take a shot. So roughly 1/2 second lag between pressing the shutter release and image capture. Definitely not DSLR performance, but I think still faster than me focusing a rangefinder.

 

[Oly5050]

Is there acway to switch off shutter priority? That means no shutter release until AF lock.

 

[pbear1973]

Is there acway to switch off shutter priority? That means no shutter release until AF lock.

Just looked, can't find one. It will release on AF lock for 99% of the time though, from the couple of hundred shots I've taken. There is an image review that appears in the VF or on the LCD each time you snap (can be turned off) so you can see if it was in focus or not.

I prefer to turn it off.. Shooting seems faster without it.

 

[pbear1973]

Taken about 200 shots now. A summary of what I feel (I'm not a qualified camera tester, so take my opinions with a gallon of salt):

Likes:

- Lightweight, small, extremely pretty camera. Easily the best looking camera I own.
- Discreet. I stood near to a guy and snapped his picture without him even knowing.
- Very sharp IQ, nice color rendering. With proper ISO settings pictures of blue sky and white clouds were so blue and white.
- Awesome low-light performance. Eats my GF3 for breakfast. Lower noise than even my D7000 at each respective ISO setting.
- Built in 3-stop ND-filter. Very nice!
- Excellent build quality.
- Positioning of controls is excellent.
- Hybrid viewfinder is a beauty! OVF is a pleasure to use. Large, bright. Field of view is larger than the frame so you can see what's outside your frame, and perhaps re-frame the picture. The frame-lines shown represent 90% of the captured image, so you know that everything that is framed will be captured.
- EVF is a God-send in poor light conditions! So nice, bright and clear.
- Detailed OVF/EVF info. Histogram, spirit-level, shutter speed, aperture, framing lines, etc. Displays subject distance when the release is half-pressed. When in MF displays the current focusing distance and the focus range for the given aperture. Very nice!
- In-VF review of pictures taken. Very nice to see whether your shot came out properly without having to take your eyes off the VF.
- Very snappy when using zone-focusing.
- Extremely quiet shutter. You can barely even hear it.

Dislikes

- Some design decisions are downright stupid. E.g. lens cap held by friction. Lens cap that won't really stay in place when adapter ring is fitted. Having to fight with the camera to remove the lens ring. Fitting the strap lugs was an epic challenge until I read the manual and saw that I had to use the "lug fitting tool". Duh.

- MF is completely unusable. Focus ring is too small, and turning the ring slowly changes focus unbearably slow. Turning it quickly changes focus too fast. The only practical use for the MF is for zone-focusing.

- Autofocus a tad-bit slow at ~0.5 seconds. Not great if you're a snap-shooter. Ok if you're used to manually focusing on range-finders and used to planning a shot ahead of time.

- OVF focusing at distances <80 cm can be inaccurate. Must remember to switch to EVF when doing so. However focus area can be made smaller to make it more accurate.

Overall though you can see that my number of likes is much more than dislikes. This is a really beautiful camera that delivers where it counts most; image quality. I think the somewhat slow AF might be a sore point with many people, so if you're looking to capture sports or running children, it's probably not the camera for you. But if you're the sort who likes to anticipate shots, does zone-focusing most of the time, or takes pictures of scenery or not-so-fast objects, it's an excellent tool.

 

[pbear1973]

Some samples. The roof-top samples were taken at -0.6ev so were underexposed, taken at sunrise at ISO800, fine JPG, adobeRGB color space. I corrected in Lightroom using auto-exposure. Other than that there was no other post-processing. These were taken in a hurry with no image review. Will post more pix when I get the time to shoot more, this time with proper ev values. Colors were set at mid-high while everything else (sharpness etc) were set at standard.

http://photobucket.com/x100-samples

 

[pbear1973]

The last set of shots I took weren't very good. Sorry I fiddled with my camera a bit too much so some of the settings were out of whack. Here's a much better set, with colors set to neutral, ev comp largely set to 0 (except one shot where it was set to +0.7ev), auto WB and on standard film emulation instead of Velvia. All shot with aperture priority auto.

Look at the shot taken at ISO5000. Beautiful. The bokeh on the macro shots is really nice too.

These were shot in RAW and exported using LR3 with no post-processing of any form, unlike the last set where I had to do auto-ev compensation due to cleverly setting the camera to -0.6ev.

http://photobucket.com/x100new

Oddly the main thing I dislike about the camera is the Fuji leather half-case. It's not snug enough, and there is some "give" in my hands which I find annoying when taking pictures. Would be nice if it was snug like the one on my Konica Auto S2. Might look around for another case.

Some samples. The roof-top samples were taken at -0.6ev so were underexposed, taken at sunrise at ISO800, fine JPG, adobeRGB color space. I corrected in Lightroom using auto-exposure. Other than that there was no other post-processing. These were taken in a hurry with no image review. Will post more pix when I get the time to shoot more, this time with proper ev values. Colors were set at mid-high while everything else (sharpness etc) were set at standard.

http://photobucket.com/x100-samples

 

[Dfive]

Love my X100..... It's a keeper for me